Abstract
Cross-modal studies involving vision and hearing show a facilitation of responses elicit by visual target in the presence of auditory stimuli (Boyne et al., 2005). This study aimed to investigate the effects of different auditory stimuli on visual attention measured by reaction times to detection of the visual stimulus under three different experimental conditions. Participants were undergraduate and graduate students 18 to 30 years old (n=19). In experiment I participants were instructed to attend, simultaneously, two square frames subtending 4° of visual angle located 10° to the right and left of the center of the screen. The task was to key press on a joystick to the onset of a target, a white dot subtending 0.2° of visual angle presented at 154 different positions, while always fixating a small cross in the center of the visual field. Stimulus duration was brief (100ms) to avoid eye movements and concomitant attentional shifts. Experiment II was designed in a similar way but included a congruent auditory cue, i.e monotic ipsilateral 1000 Hz tone at 70 dBHL, that was presented at different cue-target stimulus onset asynchrony (750-1500 ms). Whereas in Experiment III instead of a congruent auditory cue, a white noise at 70 dBHL was presented during the entire procedure. In Experiment II reaction times in the attended region were faster when compared to Experiment I. In Experiment III participants showed longer reaction times when compared to Experiments I and II. These results suggest that an informative (spatially congruent) auditory stimulus contributed to visual attention whereas a non informative (spatially non congruent) auditory stimulus may function as a distractor of visual attention.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2013